Receiving television signals from terrestrial broadcasters provides viewers with the lowest cost access to major content programming. As much as fifty percent of all television viewing comes from the major broadcasters. With the introduction of digital video it is now possible for viewers to have access to extraordinary video quality due to MPEG digital encoding. Unfortunately, many viewers do not have antennas to receive digital signals. In the early days of television when the video was encoded in an analog format, reception could be achieved with the use of inexpensive indoor antennas. A popular implementation of indoor antenna, “rabbit ears” provided viewers with a way to optimize reception by adjusting the position of the antenna elements. For UHF frequencies, the user adjusted the position of the loop element. For VHF frequencies, the user would the telescoping antenna elements to a position that would maximize the signal. An example of a “rabbit ears” antenna is provided in FIG. 1.
When television was new and novel, users would not mind the adjusting that came with rabbit ears in order to receive a signal for a particular station. Also, with analog television, it is possible to receive a signal with quite a bit of noise and still watch a show. So, a user with rabbit ears could expect to at least be able to receive and watch shows even if the reception was not perfect. However, with the advent of digital video encoding, it is no longer possible to have a gradual declination of viewing experience.
Today, users are no longer interested in fiddling with antennas to receive television signals. Users expect not only high-quality but high reliability with video reception. With digital television signals, there is no graceful degradation of signal. If the received signal is not sufficient to provide all of the bits to the television, the reception ceases. Not only that, a user has no idea how close to losing reception he/she is during reception. With analog broadcasting, users could easily see how well their positioning of the rabbit ears would affect their viewing.